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THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
Beyond the co-production of technology and society: the discursive treatment
of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals
Mehmet Ali Üzelgün*, João Rui Pereira*
*ArgLab, Institute of Philosophy, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
The co-production of technology and society is today a widely accepted notion. On the other hand, there is arguably a puzzle
or “paradox” of technology, where the means par excellence to higher-level (e.g., socio-environmental) goals comes into
view as an end in itself. We hold that to overcome the paradox, and to better understand co-production of technology and
society, one needs to distinguish between near-term/concrete and long-term/abstract institutional contexts. We draw on an
extended framework of practical reasoning and argumentation to refashion the distinction made in the literature repeatedly
but in an inconsistent manner between concrete/particular (technologies) and abstract/general (technology), and put it in a
temporal-teleological perspective. In a study of interviews (N=25) with Portuguese low-carbon energy transition actors, we
show that (1) in the near-term/concrete context of renewable energy technologies, technological change is discussed as
embedded in the institutional framework, and (2) when the spatio-temporal horizons of the discussion is enlarged, technology
features in the discourse an independent external force. While particular technologies feature as means in a primarily goals-
based reasoning, technology-in-general enters into discussion mainly with its consequences. We conclude by emphasizing the
need to pay attention to transfer and interference of meaning in the discourse concerning multi-layered and multi-phased
(environmental) policy problems.
Keywords: Practical Argumentation, Environmental discourse, Socio-technical change, Low-carbon transitions, Portugal
1. Introduction
A key trend in environmental policymaking in the last three decades concerns the shift from
traditional rule making mechanisms to a governance agenda built on goal setting (Kanie &
Biermann, 2017). Global climate change regime is a case in point: the strategic goals and decisions
devised since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit constitute a generic framework for climate-relevant action
at many scales of human activity. One central decision built into the regime was to steer action along
the lines of liberal trade and finance mechanisms, establishing sustained economic growth and
technological innovation at the core of mitigation and adaptation strategies (Bernstein, 2002). This
amounted to ascribing a key role to the business and industry actors in mitigation efforts, requiring
the transformation of both technological means and the institutions supporting their development,
transfer, and implementation.
Take for example the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development
entitled “Our Common Future”: the term technology is used no less than 360 times in this crucial
text that launched the sustainable development agenda. This report and its successor, the report of the
2012 Rio+20 Summit entitled “The Future We Want”, not only project a future state of the world to
orient society, but also establish a central role for technological innovation in this endeavor (Kanie &
Biermann, 2017). The role ascribed to technology hence features a central dividing axis in
environmental discourse, namely between reformist and radical tendencies (see Bäckstrand &
Lövbrand, 2007; Dobson, 1990). By way of illustration, while corporate executives in the cleantech
sector hail the low-carbon transitions as the “sixth technological revolution” (Caprotti, 2012, p. 376),
critics raise notions such as “carbon technocracy” to highlight the de-politicization of the governance
agenda (Lohmann, 2005, p. 230). Technology thus enters the environmental debates in both ways:
both as an exogenous neutral force or independent variable that engenders new social relations, and
as deeply politicized means – entangled in societal decisions, partnerships, regulations, cluster-
formations – in achieving sustainability goals.
This is no surprise for the literature that highlights the co-construction or co-production of
technology and society, a core basic insight of which is that technological advances both “create and
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
are affected by changes in social, economic and political structures” (Griffy-Brown, 2012, p. 107,
see also Carlsen et al., 2010; Dawson & Buchanan, 2005; Jasanoff, 2004). The notion of socio-
technical change – or systems, or transitions – captures this dynamic interplay (Geels, 2010;
Montedonico et al., 2018), avoiding the pitfalls of technological determinism and technological
neutrality (Brey, 2018). Many researchers in this field address the multidimensional complexities
involved in innovation and transition management by adopting the multi-level perspective (see Geels
et al., 2017), focusing closely on the niche–regime interactions in the broader structural context of
society. They also acknowledge the need to go beyond simple statements of co-construction (Geels,
2010, p. 508), and to develop “new kinds of research and analysis to articulate the complex, multiple,
and always contested commitments that go into making future visions toward which transitions are
directed” (Shove & Walker, 2007, p. 765).
Accordingly, in this paper we draw on a framework of practical reasoning – reasoning about what to
do given one’s goals, values and available means – that illustrates how such commitments are
connected in long-term policy problems. The framework, we contend, helps to better understand the
socio-technical entanglements at least over the background of the environmental predicament. Using
the framework we argue that, to unfold the apparent circularity of the notion of co-construction, a
distinction can be made between concrete/particular technologies and the abstract/general notion of
technology, in a similar way that is done by the public between science-in-particular and science-in-
general (Adamsone-Fiskovica, 2015; Michael, 1992). Expanding on the scheme of practical
reasoning and argumentation (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012; Lewiński, 2018), the proposed
framework redraws the concrete/particular and the abstract/general distinction with regard to the
discursive contexts emanating from the temporal and logical order of goals.
In the following sections we first provide an overview of the distinction made in the literature
repeatedly but in an inconsistent manner between particular and general notions of science. Then we
refashion the distinction using an extended practical reasoning framework, and put it in a temporal-
teleological perspective. Next we briefly introduce the institutional context our analytic approach.
Using the framework and the distinction, we examine the ways technology features in the discourse
of Portuguese low-carbon energy transition actors. In a corpus of 25 in-depth interviews conducted
with managers and engineers working in the renewable energy sector, we account for the means-ends
and deeds-consequences relations ((Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969/2010) constructed around
different notions of technology in near-term and long-term temporal-institutional contexts. Our
findings suggest that while particular technological developments are discursively embedded in the
concrete institutional framework, technology is externalized – and treated as an independent agent in
social change – when the debate moves into the broader domain of environmental politics.
2. Particular and general notions of science and technology
The pair derived from the distinction between particular and general lies among the most
characteristic pairs1 of philosophical inquiry (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969/2010, pp. 420-
436). The pair features in different guises in the public understanding of science (PUS) literature:
Drawing on an interview study on public reactions to ionizing radiation, Michael (1992)
distinguishes science-in-general, “an abstract entity or principle”, from science-in-particular, “an
activity directed at specific phenomena or problems” (p. 313). In Latour’s Politics of Nature (2004,
pp. 9-17) the distinction features as a contrast between Science and sciences. In a more recent focus
group study, Adamsone-Fiskovica (2015) shows that lay discourses on climate change and
xenotransplantation strategically switch between science-in-general and science-in-particular to
transfer the knowledge in one domain to another, i.e., to cope with lack of knowledge.
1 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca connect this distinction to the pair of concrete-abstract as well as that of means-ends (p. 433)
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
More importantly for our purposes in this paper, Wynne (1991) draws a contrast between the high
public esteem science enjoys overall and the negative reactions it suffers in specific encounters by
portraying “people to be astute at taking up science as a means… but wary about its ends and
interests” (p. 120). Here emerges a general image of science as a means for public good, and its
particular appearances with adverse social consequences. Michael (1992) concludes differently in his
study mentioned above, while agreeing that public’s differentiation from and identification with
science are discursively orchestrated through a “strong distinction” between means and ends:
“science-in-general is black boxed, and its hegemonic otherness sustained, whereas science-in-
particular, is seen… more as an element in the division of labor that leads toward the common
overarching goal” (p. 331). However, he warns that a more complex picture emerges when the goal
is problematized and the discursive context is enlarged. Although he does not dwell upon the idea
much, Michael actually seems to distinguish between the general (e.g., public good) and specific
(e.g., efficient plant functioning) goal contexts (p. 324) precisely to be able examine the discursive
orchestration of science-in-general and science-in-particular.
Concerning technology the distinction between particular and general may be seen more
straightforward, as in their concrete experiences particular technologies are strictly tied to their
function (Brey, 2018), and it is through the abstraction of the power of manifold technologies as a
“body of knowledge” that Technology becomes a unified concept (Carlsen et al., 2010, p. 210;
Hofmann, 2006). Carlsen and his colleagues make their distinction between technology and technical
artifacts, explaining the transformative role of technology with the concreteness of the device or the
artifact. In pursuit of an integrated model for the assessment of disruptive technologies, they
compare technology-push (bottom-up forecasts starting from ongoing development projects) and
market-pull methods (that resemble backcasting methodologies built on pulling technological
developments towards strategic goals) with regard to their different temporal horizons. From this
analytical concern with technological development emerges once again a complex picture in which
technology is regarded both as a goal (in technology push methods that start from the present) and a
means (in market pull methods that start from a strategic goal). Once again, the difference seems to
do with whether there is an externally set goal with its concomitant institutional – and temporal –
context, or not.
When we look at the role of technology in environmental discourse and policy through the lens
provided above, the picture seems simple at first sight: as mentioned at the outset, particular
technologies represent the means par excellence to achieve environmental goals. However, first, no
particular technology – as well as no combination of solely technical measures – can bring about
those long-term ends. They can merely serve as small steps or elements “in the division of labor that
leads toward the common overarching goal” (Michael, 1992, p. 331). Second, that environmental
problems are problems of scale, and that they consist of a combination of different spatio-temporal
contexts and horizons (Norton, 1996), further complicates the picture: particular technologies tend to
become increments of a broader – e.g., technocratic – response strategy, and become contested in
different spatial scales and temporal contexts. In the next section we are set to elucidate this complex
picture, offering a temporally extended practical reasoning and argumentation approach. Our aim in
putting together this approach is to enable a new look at the distinction drawn between the particular
and general, connecting it to near-term/concrete and long-term/abstract contexts in the enactment of
technology in environmental discourse and policy.
3. Environmental policymaking with goals: an extended practical reasoning approach
Formulation of strategic goals is crucial in policymaking. Goals both motivate and guide action: they
narrow down the scope of deliberations, serve as a standard for the evaluation of practices, and then
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
for revising and preserving action in the face of experienced implementation difficulties (Edvardsson
Björnberg, 2016; Richardson, 1997). Goals also facilitate the coordination of actors across many
scales and levels. The very idea of goal implies its attainability or the means to its achievement, and
therefore, even at the individual level, goals come as organized in clusters or systems of goals and
means (Edvardsson Björnberg, 2009; Mohammed, 2016).
Discourse on a particular policy can be examined through the basic scheme of practical argument
(Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012; Lewiński, 2018). Practical argumentation is constructed around the
question of “what shall we do?” In addressing this question, its Conclusion (e.g., We should invest in
renewables) is built upon a relation between two basic premises: a Goal or end-expressive premise
(e.g., We want low-carbon energy), and a Means or instrumental premise (e.g., With renewables we
will achieve low-carbon energy). The Goal premise is constructed in view of the present, typically
unwelcome, Circumstances (e.g., Our current path of energy generation disrupts the terrestrial-
atmospheric carbon balance). Finally, the Goal embodies the Values (e.g., ecosystem balance) to
which the speaker adheres (see Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012).
This basic scheme of practical reasoning with values is extended vastly beyond the local
circumstances and immediate goals and consequences in the case of environmental argumentation
(Lewiński & Üzelgün, 2019). Environmental policy is about the coordination of unusually many
players, even across generations, and their varied interpretations of the circumstances and visions of
the future. Even the relatively specific goals (e.g., total decarbonization of the electricity sector, in
comparison to the survival and thriving of species) are hard to attain within several decades. This
leads in environmental discourse to a complex superimposition of different time-frames and time-
scales (Harré, Brockmeier, & Mühlhäusler, 1999), partly through the coordination of a whole series
of goals, means, and the knowledge and values that support them. An example is offered in a recent
linguistically grounded analysis (Rodrigues, Lewiński, & Üzelgün, 2019; see also Lewiński, 2018)
that examines the practical argumentation in the Eco-modernist Manifesto, a manifesto circulated in
2015 by a group of prominent environmental thinkers. The Manifesto lays out a series of successive
goals, with “a good Anthropocene” at the top of the chain or hierarchy, specified along a teleological
series of means-goals (Table 1).
Table 1. The arrangement of the goals in the Ecomodernist Manifesto, simplified from Rodrigues, Lewiński, & Üzelgün, 2019
[The most abstract and distant goal]
A good Anthropocene
^
A stabilized climate
^
A decarbonized society
^
^
^
Accelerated technological progress
^
Abundant power-dense energy
^
Innovation and technology transfer
[The most concrete and immediate goal]
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
To be sure, such clean and tidy hierarchies of goals fail to depict the complexity of multi-level
governance and policy making, as well as technological change (Dawson & Buchanan, 2005). First
of all, each goal in a hierarchy would have several other consequences, which might be formulated
as goals, e.g., creating employment. Second, each goal also has alternative means of achievement,
which furnish environmental policymaking with complex networks of disagreement (Lewiński &
Mohammed, 2019; Lewiński & Üzelgün, 2019). Thirdly, even when agreed upon by the parties to a
debate to be such, a goal of higher-level may have consequences pertinent to a goal at the lower
level2. For example, a proposal for climate engineering may discourage people to participate in
relevant local action, thereby affecting the very conditions – the baseline scenarios – which are
assumed in its formulation. All in all, our example merely highlights the future-orientation and
temporal extension of goal chains, in expense of what in actuality is always contested and relational
in every step of such teleological series, due to competing concerns of diverse parties.
Still, such simplified laddering of goals is useful to illustrate a series of characteristics of long-term
policy problems. First, in any such sequence, each goal features as a means – or circumstances – to a
higher-level goal3, each obtains its normative power from the level above, and each is specified or
operationalized by the level below (Edvardsson Bjornberg, 2009; Richardson, 1997, pp. 49-57). This
means that, secondly, higher-level or distant goals are rather generic and supported by abstract
values (e.g., thriving or diversity of life), while lower-level or proximal goals are more specific,
supported by concrete values (e.g., resource productivity of a new wind-tribune). Third, such
competing, interlocking and transforming goal chains are a characteristic of environmental
policymaking, requiring diverse actors to coordinate with a view towards the future(s). Take for
instance the global goal set in 2015 Paris Summit, namely to limit global warming “to well below
2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above
pre-industrial levels”. This loosely set target still provides a more specific version of the goal
“stabilize the climate” in Table 1, calling for further specification of the designation “well below
2oC” as well as how to achieve it.
Fourth, such incremental series of goals reflect the tension between the status quo and the
overarching goal of sustainability (Atkinson, 2011). And technology enters this picture as the central
mediating factor between the efforts to draw the debate towards the status quo and the overarching
goal. In other words, technological goals serve as lower-level (means-)goals, in the achievement of
higher-level or long-term environmental goals. This however is a claim that requires elaboration due
to modern technology’s reversal or “paradox” of the means (Feenberg, 2010; Hofmann, 2006). In
this regard, drawing on Simmel’s (1900/2004) discussion of teleological series of means – in his
Philosophy of Money, where he reserves a chapter on “sequences of purposes” – Gunderson (2017)
highlights modern technology as an alienated cultural form on account of its reversal of the
Aristotelian means-ends relationship. When we, to achieve the distant ends, focus on and prioritize
the means, he writes:
The result is a situation in which means must be treated as ends for periods of time, until a given valued end is
attained. This necessity has increased in intensity and time in modern societies, where (...) the intensification of
the tendency to treat means as ends (...) due to highly developed and complex technological systems is the basis
of humanity's “enslavement” to these systems (Gunderson, 2017, p. 66).
2 This is a central tenet of the theory of reflexive modernization (Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1994), which highlights the acting of the
consequences of actions upon the consideration of the very actions. From a critical vantage point that views goals as imaginaries, such
reciprocal processes of interference may entail the rejection of teleology or hierarchisation of goals (see Hajer & Pelzer, 2011). However,
goals are simultaneously commitments, not just “fictional expectations”, and it is this quality of goals that matters for policymaking.
3 It could be argued that each such chain or hierarchy could be continued upwards till the ultimate end. Only the very top-level goal,
presumably a quite abstract one, would embody absolute and intrinsic values. The persistent debate on intrinsic values is not our main
concern in this paper, for a summary and discussion see Weston (1996).
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
The quote eloquently describes the exceptional status of technology in environmental policymaking,
most explicitly for “technological optimists” or “Prometheans” (Dryzek, 2013; Keary, 2016). Just as
in the example of money, ascending from a means of exchange to a whole system of capital
accumulation, it is the agreement of diverse actors on the potential of a certain means in realizing
their different ends that grants its use as an independent end (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca,
1969/2010, p. 275). Technological innovation, a key domain of agreement in global environmental
governance, then comes to signify both an end that can afford a multiplicity of world-making
projects, and a loss of sight in front of the many future worlds it affords.
But what are the discursive dynamics in the treatment of mere means as ends, and the contexts in
which technology emerges as an independent “enslaving” system? We hold that to answer such
questions one needs to refashion the distinction between concrete/particular and abstract/general
levels of valuing (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969/2010, pp. 77-79) of technology. It follows
from the discussion above that such refashioning can be achieved through a temporal-teleological
perspective. Since our focus in this study is on the discursive contexts emanating from the temporal
disparity and logical order of goals, from the present to the far future, we can now operationalize the
extended practical reasoning approach outlined above along the renewed distinction. In this
framework, the distinction between Little Futures and Big Futures (Michael, 2017) helps in looking a
new at the distinction between the particular and general by connecting it to near-term/concrete and
long-term/abstract contexts in the enactment of technology in environmental discourse and policy.
According to Michael, while Little Futures concern existent technological practices whose impact
describes a relatively tighter spatio-temporal horizon, Big Futures imply far-reaching substantial
transformations whose spatio-temporal horizons are relatively large-scale. The Little Futures that are
elaborated in detail at present feature in discourse as more concrete and specific goals, whereas Big
Futures remain mostly generic, speculative, and remain abstract in their use in discourse4.
Our goal in this study is to provide evidence for the discursive treatment of technology in these two
temporal-institutional contexts. In the near-term temporal context where our interviewees are
embedded in well-defined institutional relations we aim to answer the following questions: (1)
Whether and how are low-carbon transition technologies connected to the institutional environment?
Do they determine institutional change, are determined by it, or change independently from it? In the
long-term temporal context where the goals and institutional relations are loosely set, we aim to
answer: (2) Whether and how technology in general is connected to society and its environment?
Does it determine social-environmental change, is determined by it, or change independently from
it?
4. The institutional contexts
In the last decade Portugal has emerged as a somewhat unlikely forerunner in the field of energy
transitions. While in early 2000s about 1% of electricity production came from wind sources, by
2016 wind’s share increased to more than 23% (Peña, Azevedo, & Ferreira, 2017). In 2014, the
country produced almost 60% of its electricity through renewable energy technologies, second only
to Denmark among OECD countries (Bento & Fontes, 2015). In March 2018, renewable production
reached a figure equivalent to 99% of the domestic consumption, and 83% of consumption and
4 An alternative framework is provided by Norton’s tri-scalar model of values (1996). To take into account the temporal features of human-
nature interactions, Norton proposes to analytically distinguish (1) values that express the preferences of individuals in short-term and
mainly economic issues, (2) a community-oriented, intergenerational scale in which the concerns are extended to other species and
generations, and (3) a global-planetary scale with essentially indefinite timescales. While a tripartite distinction may provide a more
elaborate scope for the analysis, the material we collected does not allow for exploration of such a scope. The more simplistic general-
particular pair may be defended by arguing that the boundaries between the community and global scales are increasingly blurred,
especially in the new context of the epoch called the Anthropocene,
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
export balance (REN, 2018). This “spectacular progression” of new renewable energy technologies
in Portugal has been possible via the creation of an industrial cluster, a stable, reassuring legal and
regulatory framework, and strong investment subsidies and feed-in tariffs (Bento & Fontes, 2016, p.
309; Peña, Azevedo, & Ferreira, 2017). Still, the institutional dynamics of this progression in low-
carbon transitions is largely unrecognized and understudied. Particularly lacking are studies
scrutinizing the insiders’ views on the well-established goals and norms transition: opinions and
narratives of business professionals – e.g., concerning the interplay between technology and society
– who have spearheaded Portugal’s noteworthy leap in low-carbon energy production.
The broader institutional context of the sustainable development agenda has been under construction
for about three decades. Although it has certainly inspired local and national level transformations
such as that of Portugal, the global level policy framework suffers from a lack of clearly defined
goals and agreement on key terms such as the very notion of sustainability (Dryzek, 2013, pp. 145-
155). This is to some extent inescapable, as the very broad spatial and temporal horizons involving
diverse parties do not permit the stabilization of meaning and values. Thus, in an increasingly
fragmented and destabilized system of global governance, the recently refashioned Sustainable
Development Goals can be seen to represent an effort to merely maintain a generic framework whose
key role is to keep the conflicting parties together. In sum, the long-term goals of the broad
institutional context differs significantly from the national institutional context of Portugal not just
with regard to its wider spatio-temporal horizons, but also with its lack of specificity, established
norms, and enforcing loci of power.
5. The interview study
We conducted 25 semi-structured in-depth interviews with managers and engineers active in the low-
carbon transitions in Portugal. The companies were selected and reached through the renewable
energy business associations (APREN, APEMETA), considering their involvement in issues of
sustainability and energy transitions. Participants were mostly the managers of the companies who
offered appointments after the initial email and phone communications. The interviews were
conducted in the workspace of the participants, carried out mostly in English5, and lasted on average
about 110 minutes.
We sought to discuss both concrete the states of affairs with regard to energy transitions, and the
broader views towards the green economy, climate change, nature, as well as European and global
environmental policies. Our interview guide included no questions concerning specific technologies.
The transcribed interviews were coded in the qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti, where we
coded for Renewable energy technologies (wind, solar, hydro), Storage, Mobility, Grid, and
Technology policies. The differences concerning the discursive formats used for expressing the role
of technology in different temporal-institutional contexts surfaced at this point.
In the analysis of the coded segments where technology features centrally in the interview
discussion, we employed the rhetorical perspective of argumentation (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca,
1969/2010; Tindale, 2017). Argumentation theory is built upon externalized commitments – to
shared and contested values – rather than on motivations (Mohammed, 2016). Its rhetorical variants
are particularly attentive to sequential, presentational, and temporal aspects of discourse. In this
perspective, argument and narrative are not seen as disparate enunciative modes (Tindale, 2017), and
5 Where they felt more comfortable, the interviewees switched to their mother tongue, Portuguese. Each interview was carried out by two
interviewers fluent in both languages, one of whom speak Portuguese as mother-tongue. Four interviews were held mostly in Portuguese.
Overall, more than 90% of the collected corpus is in English, about 10% in Portuguese.
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
narratives can be examined as vehicles for the persuasive presentation of values. The co-existence of
competing narratives and forecasts of change alone indicates an argumentative context (Dawson &
Buchanan, 2005). What matters significantly for the practical reasoning framework introduced in
Section 3 is the causal and sequential relations reconstructed in discourse. What guides the analysis
this framework is a particular relation, namely of the ‘deed-consequence’ or the ‘means-end’6, and
depending on what is prioritized or disqualified, “the accent will be put on the first or the second of
the two terms” (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969/2010, p. 271). Accordingly, in what follows we
pay specific attention to the temporal-sequential relations and the hierarchies of values constructed in
the interview discourse.
6. Unraveling the co-construction of technology and society
6.1 The concrete context of renewable energy technologies: wind, solar, and storage
A salient characteristic of the discourse on technological development within the renewables sector
is a particular temporal arrangement, which was used to highlight both the development of the
Portuguese renewable energy sector, and the challenges faced at present. Below we describe these in
turn. The first set of examples account for a comparative organization of before and now, through
which the interviewees described the sectorial progress and maturation. The first excerpt exemplifies
its simplest form:
Example 1, Interview 22. Before and now
Before you had small turbines for-for that areas with big wind. Now you have bigger turbines, with bigger diameter, that
are more adequate to put in locations where the wind is not so good.
In this example the technical developments in wind energy production are depicted in relation to the
conditions – more precisely, the feasible locations – of production: while earlier equipment allowed
for production only in sites with “big wind”, current equipment permits its feasible use in suboptimal
conditions. In other words, in this case technological development appears to explain the
developments in the implementation of wind energy facilities. In almost all other situated narratives,
however, the relation is constructed in the opposite direction. That is, unlike the example above, in
the considerations of concrete states of affairs, technological change appears as embedded in, and
bound by, the institutional environment. Two examples of how regulations, subsidies, feed-in tariffs,
etc. take precedence in the discussion of the socio-technical transitions follow:
Example 2. Interview 8. No feed-in tariffs anymore
15 years ago, ok, that nobody wanted to take it, and we decided to go to these projects because um we had these guarantees,
ok? We go, we take the risk, but we have these guarantees, and that's why we receive it more. Nowadays, renewable energy
projects that are goin- that are being constructed nowadays, they receive market price of electricity, they don't receive feed-
in tariffs anymore, ok? Because the technology has evoluted, the technology has become more cheap, and you don't need it,
uh, a feed-in tariff for that, ok? And that's the ideal scenario, and that was always the program and the- and the plan, ok?
Example 3. Interview 10. People started complaining
In Portugal, what happened was that there are really good incentives at start, and from day- one day to the other, just people
started complaining about renewables, and the price of renewables, not taking into account lots of- of factors of what tariffs
they pay at their homes are composed of. And this-this is uh many people don't understand that other- even the-the coal and
conventional power plants are subsidized... from many ways. They're just... If you'd go for spot market, most certainly
nobody would be able to pay their-their operational costs of having their coal power plant. Because everybody is getting
some kind of subsidy.
6 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca introduce the two-sided ‘deeds-consequences’/‘means-ends’ relations in the context of their discussion of
“pragmatic argumentation”, their term for practical argumentation discussed in Section 3.
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
To highlight the sectorial challenges faced at present, these examples use the same comparative
format to emphasize how these transpired: before-now. This move was commonly used for
describing the development of the (Portuguese) renewable energy sector with its particular
institutional features. The factor of technology featured as merely one variable among the prices,
subsidies, tariffs, estimates, regulations, and public support determining the path of the transition to a
low-carbon economy. Looking at Example 2, one may say it is the technology that has “evolved”
and “become more cheap” to compete with fossil fuel energy, and therefore feed-in tariffs are no
longer needed. Although the evolution metaphor seems to imply that technology develops naturally,
that “it was always the plan” indicates the embeddedness of its development in the institutional
context.
From the perspective of practical argument, the change concerns the circumstances: what was the
goal about a decade ago has now transformed into being the current state of affairs. The narrative
format employed to emphasize this transformation – from feed-in tariffs to competition in free
market (Example 2), and from public legitimacy to public complaint (Example 3) – is embedded in
complex argumentative structures. Rather than merely recounting what happened in the past decade,
the interviewees uphold the legitimacy of their business that seems to be at stake in the new social
context: before, they took the risk that “nobody wanted”, and now people criticize “not taking into
account lots of factors” in how power plants are subsidized. In short, this narrative format intertwines
technological advances with other institutional affairs, essentially embedding the former in the latter.
A second notable feature of the discourse on sectorial technological change concerned the
designations of – at times, a critical threshold in – the near future. Such designations operate as both
informed predictions and instruments for setting sectorial goals (Dawson & Buchanan, 2005) from
the insiders of the business community. When it comes to play as in Examples 5 and 6 below, the
critical threshold indicates the next step in the maturation and mainstreaming of new renewable
energy technologies. Again, their maturation and mainstreaming was discussed mostly as an
outcome of the societal efforts, and as built into the planning of the industry:
Example 4, Interview 19. Regulations will kill coal
I will expect in the next, I believe, ten years, a lot of different ways to obtain electric-electricity that we don't have today,
ok? The world must adapt to this batteries boom. And coal is not an option, ok? Coal is not an option, because uh uh the
carbon eh emissions will... well, I believe they, those regulations will kill eh the electricity generated by-by coal, ok? You
will use coal for steel, because it must, and I don't believe more than that the next twenty years.
Example 5, Interview 24. The fourth industrial revolution7
In ten years the photovoltaic cell has evolved enormously, batteries are evolving enormously. So, once we overcome this
problem, which is the big problem we have at the moment, the energy storage, it is said that it will be the fourth industrial
revolution, the energy storage. I believe so. Because, Tesla is there testing some things that if you can get it on a small
battery, with molecules that can absorb energy, then dissipating by stirring...
Example 6, Interview 13. The game changer we now need
Um, if you-you, in a point in time, um, or a company, is-is able to develop a good storage solution, then I will- I will tell
you that the future will be fully renewable. But that's the game changer that we now need, in terms of renewable, it's
absolu- this is for me the characteristic.
As these excerpts exemplify, the talk on impending sectorial futures focused mostly on techniques of
energy storage. In this talk, battery technologies, “the game changer we now need”, represent the
current bottleneck for the next step in low-carbon transitions. The discourse on the “batteries boom”
assumes a conditional (e.g., “once we...”, “if a company...”) format, implying not only the goal-
setting feature of this argumentative arrangement, but also the corporate agency behind the pursuit of
7 Translated from Portuguese: “A tecnologia está a evoluir estrondosamente, em dez anos uma célula fotovoltaica evoluiu horrores, as baterias estão a evoluir horrores, portanto, basta-
nos ultrapassar esse problema, que é o grande problema que temos neste momento, de armazenagem de energia, e dizem que vai ser a quarta revolução industrial, a armazenagem de
energia, eu acredito que sim. Porque, sei lá, a Tesla está aí a testar umas coisas que se a gente conseguir numa pequena bateria, com moléculas que conseguem- absorvem energia, depois
por agitação dissipar...”
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
the specified goals. The many references to figures such as Elon Musk as leaders of change,
exemplified in Excerpt 6, highlight the primacy ascribed to corporate efforts in this pursuit. In other
words, “the game changer” is not a discrete technological innovation that is projected in the next
couple of years, but a goal for the industry as well as for the society striving for the transitions. In
this way, the most immediate sectorial goal in the long-term incremental transformation of society
was designated as overcoming the main drawback in the implementation and upscaling of solar and
wind energy technologies – the problem of intermittency8.
Among the three examples quoted above, “regulations will kill coal” (Example 4) is perhaps the
most explicit one in terms of the relations between the government and low-carbon technologies.
There is no doubt that technology is regarded as a powerful force or determinant in the low-carbon
transitions. However, if the technology is “booming” in way that changes the game, if it seems to
engender “the fourth industrial revolution”, this is due to the planning, regulations, subsidies, and all
those efforts of diverse actors pursuing higher ends. Those higher or long-term ends that will be our
focus in the next section are at this discussion – of concrete renewable energy technologies –
represented mainly by the government and its abilities. In other words, here technological change is
ultimately embedded in and to a large extent shaped by broader environmental policies. We close
this section by one final example that is rather explicit in this regard:
Example 7, Interview 6. Not a technological evolution9
The batteries have improved, now they are made of lithium, not of lead... Look, but there is not a proper technological
evolution here, there is an environmental evolution that forced those large companies to convert.
6.2 Technology in the broader context: relative autonomy of the unified concept
As the discussion moved from the concrete context of renewable energy technologies towards other,
broader contexts – or Big Futures – in which technology comes into play, the discourse on the
tension between technology and society (e.g., decisions, institutions, regulations) shifted
significantly. In many cases technology was treated as a distinct system that “evolves” independently
from other institutional affairs. It was inscribed not only as the central factor in social change and
transitions, but also as a goal that implies – and in some cases, an external force that threatens –
sustainability by itself. Just before the example quoted below, to a question on the role of the
government in sustainability transitions, Interviewee 3 responded that the government should, “to the
best of its abilities”, focus on speeding up the transition in terms of technology and lifestyles. He
then advanced by focusing exclusively on technology:
Example 8, Interview 3. Regulations unable to accommodate
I think technology is inevitably going to change, regardless of, um, uh, of government. Governments will obviously have a
huge impact on whether technology goes one way or the other, but in some shape or form, technology is going to change.
After a lengthy discussion of Uber’s recent transformation of urban mobility practices and
destruction of the “taxi ecosystem”, his argument proceeds:
That just shows you how unprepared the political system was for that kind of technological change. Now imagine that, and
multiply it by a hundred different types of innovations and technologies that are going to happen, whether it’s the ubiq-
ubiquity of solar panels on everybody’s roof (...) So, again, uh, I'm not a technological optimistic, I mean, in my better
days, when I'm feeling optimistic, I am optimistic about technology, on my worse days I’m very pessimistic about
technology, as in “technology will bring us a lot of trouble”. What I’m sure is that technology’s change is very, very rapid,
8 Transition to electric mobility, another goal connected to the new generation battery technologies, also constituted a prominent discussion. We cannot expand further on this due to
considerations of space.
9 Translated from Portuguese: “As baterias melhoraram, agora são de lírio, já não são de chumbo... é pá, mas não há aqui propriamente uma evolução tecnológica, há uma evolução
ambiental, que obrigou essas grandes empresas a reconverterem-se.”
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
and I'm fairly certain that we do not have the political system to cope with that amount of technological change. And again,
Uber is just one example.
In this switching between the specific example and the broader discussion, technology comes into
view with its consequences, namely the disruptive consequences for society. Many times regarded as
the fountain of progress and well-being, here it features as an external threat, a sovereign agent. We
will return to this oscillation between the – so-called – optimist and pessimist views of the impact of
technology. The source of the mismatch between technology and society is that “technology’s
change is very, very rapid”, and the institutions designed to keep it in check fail to contain its pace.
This temporal discrepancy widely used in the interviews to differentiate technology echoes in the
following way in Interview 13:
Example 9, Interview 13. Becoming quickly obsolete
...the regulation to give time for the people to think, to explain again, that we-we are becoming quickly obsolete. Because
we, to evolve we need decades, and if we look at technology, it needs a couple of years, mm- months, to evolve.
Notice that here the evolution metaphor is used both for the society and for technology, precisely to
emphasize their different timescales. In his broader argument concerned with the ways to change
consumption practices, the same interviewee first defended the power of economic incentives, and
continued with a second factor in the equation:
...if you see some economical benefit, then things will start happening. And then there’s another thing, so, this is evolution:
you have a smartphone, I have a smartphone, I guess you also have a smartphone. Nowadays, if you want a normal phone,
it’s very difficult to do, and you have created already that, umm... need from the people, um, to your smart phones, and the
need for the smart grid and smart devices, it will come. It's natural.
Naturalized in this example are techno-scientific progress as well as the creation of consumer
demand, and the two are intimately connected. First, as long as there is some economic benefit,
diffusion of technologies – the interviewee again resorts to a concrete example – into wider sectors
of society occurs naturally. Second, if in the consumption context technology seems to drive the
social needs and wants, and orient the society towards the future, this is due to the production
context, where – the pace of – technology outstrips all societal mechanisms, rendering them
“obsolete”. The primacy of technology and its discrepancy with society was not always naturalized,
what characterized the discourse on the unified notion was a double-faced image of technology –
both orienting and disorienting society. This second view that featured as a pessimism of
“technology will bring us a lot of trouble” in Example 8 was at times articulated with regard to a
historic derailment of science and technology:
Example 10, Interview 10. When things went bad
...when we started changing the properties of things, and working chemically on things, and when humans discovered that
they could change the properties of materials, that’s when things went bad. And I think that’s where pollution comes from.
(...) And I think that was the big, and that came with industrial revolution and all.
Here Interviewee 10 locates the source of pollution – in an abstract manner – in both a particular
endeavor, and a particular time. Associated with the industrial revolution are the technological
advances that provided humans the ability of changing “the properties of materials”. The acquisition
of that ability designates a boundary, after which “things went bad”. The problems of the present are
hence asserted as to originate in the conquests of the past. In other words, we are dealing with the
consequences of yesterday’s technology, which have transformed into today’s circumstances.
Although the interviewees were rather pessimistic of technology’s consequences, they by no means
gave up optimism over its promises. Crucially, such promises enabled the interviewees to evade
difficult choices and reconcile conflicting views. For example, when discussing the proposal of a
new airport for Lisbon, Interviewee 11 expressed outward support for it, with an attempt to change
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
the direction of the discussion: “I believe in the airport, but I believe that the plane should be
different.” Against the challenge concerning the different plane also having some environmental
costs, he resorted to the role of technology in minimizing those costs. The discussion then unfolded
the following way:
Example 11, Interview 11. No limits in technology
- So, are you having this kind of, I’d say, technocratic or futuristic view, that technology is going to make everything
possible? Or do you think, for instance, there’re certain limits to- like physical limits? Because…
- No, I-I have the other view... that you- we can find the technology to make things happen. Maybe in- we will have to
change somethings, maybe you- we won't fly 300 people at once, you know? But I think it-it will be that way, that... there
are no limits, in technology. Yes, because we've seen, we haven't, but yeah, in the last fifteen years... the evolution of
technology from our youth, it has evolved so much we’d never think it would be possible... to do what we do now. So,
yeah.
Interviewee 11 here upholds what was called the optimistic position even when it is labelled as
“technocratic”. The argument offered to support the claim “there are no limits” falls back on past
experience to create an indication for a more general trend or property, namely the world-making
capacity of technology. This subset of argumentation by example draws on a sign retrieved from
experience (Macagno & Walton, 2014): given that in the last fifteen years technology has made
possible so much, there will be no limits to its “making things happen”.
Most strikingly in this example, and broadly when Big Futures are involved in the discussion, there
was very scant attention to external forces on technology-in general, such as markets, lobbies,
regulations, or to issues of path dependency and technological inertia, which would signify a critical
relation to the techno-scientific developments’ locking into existing states of affairs. Likewise, even
in the arguments critical of technology’s consequences – that were called pessimist – there was
virtually no mention of an external force or limit such as nature or society. Society was represented
mainly on the receiving side of the innovations, both as transforming consumers and obsolete
governments. Similarly, rather than a castrating limit, nature also featured in the interview discourse
as amenable to the consequences of technological intervention. In the words of Interviewee 13,
technology can enable us “to decrease the impact of the-the bad things that we are doing to the
planet. Um, but that's- but we will end, at some point, end with nature as we know today”.
Once again, ending with nature as we know it today is not a goal, but a consequence of technological
interventions. In the absence of limiting or checking mechanisms that are able to contain its pace, the
process of techno-scientific transformation of the natural environments was thus depicted as if
rolling down a slippery slope. The valuation of technologies as means to environmental goals was
abandoned by and large at the broader discussion of technology-in general. Technology was never
disvalued explicitly, but its uncontrollable nature is what characterized the discourse at the broader
temporal-teleological context:
Example 12, Interview 1. We don’t have the time
- Do you think humanity should technologically, try to at least, control or manage the world’s ecosystems, in order...
- It’s not if they should or not, they’re already doing it. So it’s- it’s something that it’s not- it’s not a choice for us to make,
it’s already happening. The thing is, until what scale are people going to do that, you know? And um, maybe we can get to
a point, if you are re-engineered, if the human body is re-engineered to get 90% of their energy from the sun, right, then
most of the problems that we face right now will disappear. It’s “can we do that?” you know? Uh... probably not in 40
years’ time. You know? And that’s-that’s- the main problem is that we don't have the time.
As well known in the debate on climate geo-engineering, the argument that humankind “already”
alters the planetary systems significantly is used as a premise for the defense of deliberate
intervention in those systems (Dryzek & Pickering, 2018, 5.16; Gardiner, 2011, p. 353). In this
example, the argument that “it’s not a choice for us to make” further indicates an unavoidable path of
techno-industrial intervention in the Earth systems. Following this argument, Interviewee 1
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Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
announces his open-minded approach to technological change, contemplating about engineering a
very specific part of the planet: human body. This move towards engineering the humankind instead
of other systems or processes draws attention the source of the problem as well as the moral
concerns. To the “can we do that?” question concerning the rather fantastic project of solar-powered
humans, the interviewee gives a relatively optimistic answer: “probably” not in 40 years. He then
reveals the rhetorical use of such an estimate by contrasting it with the timeframe imposed by the
present predicament, implying that it requires more immediate and practicable measures. In terms of
the teleological sequence provided in Section 3, this means to value technological means lower in the
hierarchy (e.g., the available means of mitigation, low carbon energy technologies), and disvalue
those that disrupt or dismantle it from above.
The prominent position upheld in the interviews against the disruptive power of technology’s Big
Futures was that of incrementalism: “I always think that best solution is not revolution. I always
think that eh the best things happen with small increases” (Interviewee 5), and “I think that it would
be very good if we start the little things” (Interview 12). Such incrementalist emphases exhibit the
practical approach of the professionals active in the low-carbon transitions, as well as their
intertwining of social and technological systems in a multi-level and multi-phase governance effort.
In pointing up the relevance and importance of small but accumulating efforts, they may be seen to
uphold a democratic governance framework. To this incrementally developed governance
framework, the technology-in-general enters as an external force, both as an uncontrollable thrust
towards and promises for the future, and a source of hesitation and reflexivity with regard to its
consequences.
7. Conclusion
The idea motivating this study was that an extended practical reasoning approach could help
untangling the complex relationship between technology and society at least in the discourse on
environmental policy and futures. We used the approach to refashion the distinction made in the
literature repeatedly but in an inconsistent manner between concrete/particular (technologies) and
abstract/general (technology), and put it in a temporal-teleological perspective. This perspective
enabled the study to focus on the ‘means-ends’ and ‘deeds-consequences’ relations (Perelman &
Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969/2010) in the corpus, and thereby to explore the values attached to technology
and its relative autonomy form society in different temporal discursive contexts.
Our analysis indicates that in the discussion concerning renewable energy technologies – i.e., when
the temporal horizon of the discussion was narrow – technological change was intimately connected
to and embedded in the institutional framework (regulations, subsidies, incentives, etc.). In this
concrete context, social and institutional affairs were regarded as enabling and circumscribing the
socio-technical transitions, and technology featured as a means to higher-level or long-term
environmental goals. Such discursive embedding of technological change can be seen to manifest a
positive view of institutional agency. Although what is dealt with in the low-carbon transition
insiders’ discourse was the contextual use of particular products (Brey, 2018), many times in a
retrospective manner (Dawson & Buchanan, 2005), rather than determining social consequences,
particular technological developments were articulated as essentially subject to the institutional
agenda. The intricate social and institutional relations that enabled the transition policies in Portugal
were beyond our focus, what matters for such discursive treatment of technology-in-particular is a
consistent expression of a well-established governance framework with its agreed upon near-term
goals and outputs, as well as its sectorial consequences.
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
Conversely, when the temporal horizon of the discussion was expanded, and when technology was
inscribed as an abstract/unified notion, it featured in the interview discourse as an external disruptive
force or an independent factor bringing about social change and transformation. In other words,
technology-in-general was treated as a relatively autonomous agent, representing both (1) the power
of (human) imagination and (2) an uncontrollable thrust towards the future. It is on one hand its
open-ended character that allows its treatment as an ultimate value, and on the other its untamable
pace that grants it the status of an independent cause and a source of threat.
With regard to the former, promising image, it may be said that the role of technology as a means for
externally set goals is presupposed by the interviewees, that technology here represents human
agency at the face of impending risks and threats. This may well be the case. The irony then is that
such an established presupposition of human agency and choices in technological pathways as well
as environmental futures comes at a time when economic globalization and deregulation render their
comprehension – let alone their governance – ever more obscure and out of reach (Stirling, 2008).
Thus emerges more prominently the latter, threatening image of technology-in-general: it comes into
view with its consequences, mainly disruptive consequences for society. In the absence of limiting
(natural) or checking (institutional) mechanisms that are able to contain its pace, the process of
techno-scientific transformation of the natural environments – that has started with the industrial
revolution – is depicted as rolling down a slippery slope. The slope can ben seen to resemble the path
of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, whose back is turned to the future towards which he is
pushed by what he can merely witness: “Where we perceive as a chain of events, he sees one single
catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and piling it in front of his feet” (quoted in
Wark, 1994, p. 118). As the efforts to contain the faced consequences and put the wreckage back in
order pile further consequences to handle, the slippery slope manifests in the replacement of goals-
based reasoning with a reflexive consideration of consequences of technology. The metaphor of the
slippery slope is striking in exhibiting that the teleological framework is not just a social construct,
but also a source of gravity that, once constructed and shared, pulls the technological society towards
the future, in the words of Interviewee 13, “to the end of nature as we know today”.
In sum, technology seems to be purified and externalized when the goal context shifts from the
concrete institutional environment to the broader and more fragmented domain of environmental
politics. The shifting narratives of the interviewees between an embedded image of technology and a
purified one evince the relevance of near-term and long-term institutional contexts in the roles and
values attached technology. Further studies on the role of technology in environmental discourse and
policy should take into account the scaling and ordering of purposes and associated temporal
contexts. More broadly, our findings also suggest that the efforts to address the enactment of values
and positions in the multi-level and multi-phase policy problems should be attentive to the
translation of meaning and transfer of values (see Adamsone-Fiskovica, 2015; Tadaki, Sinner, &
Chan, 2017). Such attention may be a requirement in contexts where different actors assume
different phases of implementation or employ different timeframes, leading to standoffs (Wibeck,
Johnson, Larrson, & Öberg, 2006). Furthermore, even in one particular discourse, and even though a
particular phase of implementation is agreed upon to follow from a previous phase, meanings and
values attached to key notions may shift, hampering the construction of a common ground in policy
discourses – due to perceived contradictions and paradoxes.
The reported study is of exploratory kind, and the generalizability of the findings beyond the context
of low-carbon transition and sustainability policies is limited. While the movement and transference
across different temporal discursive contexts is clearly an issue in any long-term policy problem, we
cannot conclude that the meaning and values attached to technology are clearly divided in the ways
accounted for above. But we conclude that the existence of a well-established institutional
THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
treatment of technology with regard to near-term and long-term environmental goals. Technology in Society,
10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101244
framework is consequential for the understanding and discursive treatment of the role of technology
in social-environmental change.
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THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S VERSION. FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION PLEASE REFER TO
Üzelgün, M. A., & Perreira, J. R. (2020). Beyond the co-production of technology and society: The discursive
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This work was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) [grant
numbers TUBITAK/0010/2014 and PTDC/MHC-FIL/0521/2014]
